About 15 minutes into their set at the new Marquee Theatre in Tempe last Tuesday, Idaho guitar ambassadors Built to Spill blasted into “The Plan,” a bombastic, subtly melodic rocker. As 700 fans or so looked on, lead singer and ax man Doug Martsch sang the lyric, “The plan means…
Let’s face it: Retro culture is pretty silly. No one will ever recapture a feeling, much less the gestalt, of an entire era with a bygone ‘do, ancient pants, or an evocative guitar effect. In music, the best way to play the retro game and not end up a prisoner…
This debut EP clocks in at just over 15 minutes, but it drops an explosively powerful sonic chunk, a melding of ’90s garage rock and ’70s Southern boogie. Despite its brevity, it may be one of the best rock releases of the year. The Nashville-based Kings of Leon all answer…
If you’re skeptical that a superstar DJ such as Germany’s Timo Maas can’t produce solid dance music on his own, you may well be right — but at least Maas (unlike some of his peers) has the good sense to freely admit that he doesn’t work alone. While he handles…
The greater Washington-Baltimore area has certainly been involved in a lot of tension-filled, white music since Minor Threat’s hard-core declarations threw up a flag of protest over Chocolate City and one of America’s R&B capitals. And can you blame the I-95ers? Even youthful rebellion in the shadows of the seat…
While Christina Aguilera sufficiently undermined a respectable (if not quite illustrious) first outing with last year’s unfortunate Stripped, a follow-up that tried to out-pink Pink, Justin Timberlake merged independence and accessibility on Justified, his confident, engaging, mature solo debut after so much *NStink. Anyone with a fondness for Off the…
If you’ve been basking in the glow of grease oozing from your glad-they-renamed-’em “freedom” fries the past few months, find something else to do. Not just because the computer popsters (pop stars?) of DAT Politics come from Lille, a rough, industrial city from the French-Belgian border, and are thus quite…
For 40 bucks, you can buy a device that emits some of the most irritating and beautiful sounds imaginable, a device that not only presents an international kaleidoscope of opinion, but also receives secret spy transmissions. Best of all, every time you turn it on, the thing behaves differently, depending…
In “The Driveby,” one of several side-splitting skits on storied hip-hop producer Prince Paul’s clever new concept album Politics of the Business, Paul finds himself confronted on the street by a hyper, exasperated fan. “I did the worm, man. I used to break-dance, man. I fuckin’ popped, locked and rocked,…
While the music business goes about choosing its acts like a high school popularity contest, music’s ranks of losers, loners and sensitive souls continue to prove true art is borne of greater hardship than bad hair days and poor fashion sense. Looking more like members of the truckers’ local than…
Okay, no surprise here: The rush-released American Idol Season 2: All-Time Classic American Love Songs, one of the worst albums in recent memory, debuted earlier this month at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. There’s plenty to scoff at here, from the laughably heart-stricken rendition of Journey’s “Open…
The Thorns have the sort of name that these days can attract a considerable ground swell of interest among young record-buyers: a definite article in front of a one-syllable plural noun that features a prominent long vowel. Last year the formula worked for the Hives, the Vines and the Strokes,…
The United States’ latest ventures abroad prove that our country is far better at combating cultures than at mixing with them. So perhaps it makes sense that three dudes from our favorite scapegoat nation should remind us about the art of the enlightened blend. Having already sold a half-million copies…
Darryl Worley’s song “Have You Forgotten?” attempts to split the patriotic difference between Toby Keith and Alan Jackson, waving the flag while showing some class, to erratic effect. The country star deserves points for rhyming “forgotten” and “bin Laden” (it’s certainly better than, say, “income-tax deduction” and “weapons of mass…
Come on — stop that Noize! Firmly in the “what th . . .” category, Quiet Riot has decided to tour, gracing us at, you guessed it, the Mason Jar with its wacky homogenized heavy metal. Quiet Riot is basically famous for two reasons: losing founding guitarist Randy Rhoads to…
Mike “Sir Pie” Gomez, the normally effusive rapper and singer for Cousins of the Wize, looks devastated, wearing a blank look of disbelief, like he’s lost his security blanket. In fact, he has. Days earlier, his Cousins rhyming partner and longtime friend Chris “CPT” Pangrazi, 29, had been killed in…
As an international post-indie rock star, Damon Albarn’s waded through it all with a grin. Along with archrival Oasis, vocalist Albarn and his band Blur ushered in the early-’90s Britpop era that saved smart guitar rock in the U.K., before the Gallaghers knocked them out of arena contention. They’ve taken…
Sorry to say it, but Silver Lake sounds like Vic Chesnutt light. The veteran singer-songwriter’s southern gothic has gone quasi-gospel, his delicate imperfection and haunted airiness glossed over. A full band of musicians leaves its stamp all over the recording, which, if memory serves, includes the only wicked guitar solo…
If you lined up all the arenas REO Speedwagon, Journey, and Styx have simultaneously rocked and wimped out end to end, it would stretch across the universe and back six times and probably resemble one of their ludicrous space-invader album covers. And if you were to flip over their Power…
Revolving casts of players complement David Bazan’s music, but there would be no Pedro the Lion without him. He is known for brooding internal meditations on existence, man’s struggles with a higher power and the dark aspects of humanity. A Christian artist, Bazan draws more indie kids than church groups,…
Pop culture historians like to pontificate that punk killed the guitar hero. Though anyone who’s seen Doug Martsch’s Stratocaster lead Built to Spill to a kind of Hendrixian Valhalla knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Punk simply reeled in the absurdity of that hero’s myth, sterilizing the…
In the recent past, Mill Avenue in Tempe has been reserved for the aging jangle-pop bands of ’90s yore, but things have started to turn. The relatively young noise-rock outfit Hotfoughtcold has joined the storied avenue’s ranks — and they’re hauling their friends with them. The year before HFC started…
